SQL Server 2016 SP1 Release – A bold move by Microsoft
A bold move by Microsoft, Is not it?
With the emergence of cloud technology, there is a huge competition in the market and everyday software Companies are coming up with lucrative deals to attract the customers. Major market players in the Database technology Oracle and Microsoft (for SQL Server) are launching new products, features and deals almost every month to compete with each other. Few months back Microsoft launched an lucrative attractive deal for the Oracle database product users to migrate to SQL Server with Free licensing and this deal is valid till December 31st, 2016. Click hereto check more about this deal from Microsoft.
Both are in nip and tuck competition, in accordance to the same, Microsoft announced another big change in the features which are supported under various Editions. Big news is that most of the features which are part of the Enterprise editions will be available in other editions with the launch of SQL Server 2016 SP1.
Being a DBA, it was very tricky to explain and convince customer to buy Standard edition licenses instead of Enterprise editions. Though there is a major difference between the price of both, still if we talk about features which were available in SQL Server Enterprise edition were much more useful and practical as compared to SQL Server standard edition.
Below is the list of the features which are changed to be available in lower editions of SQL Server 2016 version.
| RTM | SP1 | |||||||
| Feature | Standard | Web | Express | LocalDB | Standard | Web | Express | LocalDB |
| Row Level security | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Dynamic Data Masking | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Change Data Capture | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Database Snapshot | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Columnstore | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Partitioning | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Compression | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| In Memory OLTP | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Always Encrypted | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| PolyBase | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Fine grained auditing | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Multiple filestream containers | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Click here to read more about the Full list of features and other information on Microsoft blog site.
